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City Hall again hit with overtime lawsuit
City Hall has spent more than $12 million since 2012 to settle lawsuits over its failure to pay required overtime to employees ranging from police officers to social workers, sheriff’s deputies and former mayoral bodyguards.
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Air conditioning fixed at Broad Rock Elementary
The broken air conditioning system finally has been fixed at Broad Rock Elementary School, one of the newest public schools in Richmond.
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RPS officials fail to explain faulty, fluctuating graduation figures
There has been a sudden surge in the number of students graduating from Richmond Public Schools — and not just from Armstrong High School. RPS officials this week are reporting that 963 seniors received their diplomas during recent graduation ceremonies from the city’s nine high schools.
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Grand Slam: Arthur Ashe Boulevard
Politics, personalities merge in this historic moment honoring late hometown hero
Richmond is preparing to pull out all the stops to celebrate native son Arthur Ashe Jr. as it renames one its major streets in his honor.
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New Coliseum plan to launch Monday?
Will this be the City Council meeting at which Mayor Levar M. Stoney introduces ordinances on the Richmond Coliseum replacement plan?
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Technical problem thwarts court case to remove Agelasto from office
Fifth District City Councilman Parker C. Agelasto gained a reprieve Tuesday from an effort to immediately remove him from the city’s governing body. Richmond Circuit Court Judge W. Reilly Marchant refused on Tuesday to consider a former councilman’s request for a temporary injunction that would have ended Mr. Agelasto’s tenure before his planned departure on Nov. 30.
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Candidates throwing hats into ring for 5th District seat
The first candidates have begun to emerge in the race to succeed Parker C. Agelasto as the 5th District representative on Richmond City Council.
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U.S. Supreme Court upholds Virginia’s redrawn House of Delegates districts
Virginia voters and candidates now can have full confidence in the boundaries of the redrawn House of Delegate districts ahead of the Nov. 5 general election to fill the 100 seats.
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RPS officials offer free bus service in bid to boost preschool enrollment
Free bus transportation. That’s the carrot the Richmond School Board is offering in a bid to boost enrollment in its shrinking preschool program called the Virginia Preschool Initiative, or VPI.
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RPS whistleblower to be moved to another school
A Spanish teacher who blew the whistle on student grade-changing by officials at Lucille Brown Middle School in Richmond will not be fired.
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Nuns sell St. Emma and St. Frances property
A historic Powhatan County estate that was once home to two Catholic residential schools for African-Americans, including a military academy for boys, now belongs to a Petersburg area businessman.
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Upset: Challenger ‘Joe’ Morrissey garners Petersburg support to handily beat incumbent Sen. Rosalyn Dance in Tuesday’s primary
Challenger Joseph D. “Joe” Morrissey, proving tougher and more resilient than his critics anticipated, cruised Tuesday to a surprisingly easy victory over incumbent state Sen. Rosalyn R. Dance of Petersburg in a Democratic primary election.
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Other Richmond area primary victors
Around the state, the wave of primary contests included a Northern Virginia thriller in which the Senate’s top Democrat was almost unseated. Sen. Richard L. “Dick” Saslaw, 79, of Fairfax County, ended up edging two women challengers by about 500 votes, even though the 43-year General Assembly veteran outspent his challengers 20-1 in his Northern Virginia contest.
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Armstrong graduation figures better than initial report
Armstrong High School is providing best evidence that more seniors are graduating from Richmond Public Schools this year than the public could have expected given the pessimistic projections released three weeks ago by Superintendent Jason Kamras and his staff.
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Agelasto’s council fate may rest with hearing
Parker C. Agelasto’s service on Richmond City Council is now in the hands of a Richmond Circuit Court judge after months of controversy over the 5th District councilman’s move to a home outside the district.
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RPS official says LEED standards haven’t returned big savings
Richmond Public Schools’ chief operating officer confirmed a Free Press finding that building new schools to a national energy standard has failed to pay off in energy savings. Darin Simmons told the Richmond School Board on June 3 that building Huguenot High and three other schools to the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED gold standard has not resulted in “significant” savings.
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RPS attendance officers cut without placement assistance
Butler Peterson has spent the past five years visiting families of truant Richmond Public Schools students to improve their attendance. That’s just one of the jobs he has held in his 18 years with RPS and why he hoped to be considered for one of the school-based attendance liaison positions that is to replace his role as an attendance officer.
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Facial hair? Richmond Police uniformed officers now have the OK
If you see uniformed Richmond Police officers sporting beards and mustaches, they have the OK of the top brass. Interim Police Chief William C. Smith made it possible. He quietly amended the department’s grooming policy to allow patrol officers to grow and wear neatly trimmed beards, goatees and mustaches.
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Bike lanes proposed for 1st Street
Busy 1st Street in Jackson Ward would be reduced to one lane for traffic under a city proposal to install bike lanes on the west side of a roadway that is a significant link between North Side to Downtown and routes to South Side.
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HOME challenges Chesterfield apartment complex policy in federal court
How far can a landlord go in banning people with felony or serious misdemeanor convictions as tenants? A new federal lawsuit seeks to find out. The fair housing watchdog Housing Opportunities Made Equal filed the suit in U.S. District Court in Richmond June 4 to challenge a Chesterfield County apartment complex’s policy banning anyone “who has ever been convicted of any felony” from becoming a tenant.
